


Dearly Departed

by SJtrinity



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: As I Lay Dying AU, King In The Mountain AU, M/M, William Faulkner stay your vengeful hand, and also somehow still canon, honestly i have no idea how to tag this, that's right it's an AU mashup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25568653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SJtrinity/pseuds/SJtrinity
Summary: Sledgefu Week 2020 Day 2: Southern Gothic AUSledgefu Week 2020 Day 8: Myth AU
Relationships: Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Edward "Hillbilly" Jones, Merriell "Snafu" Shelton/Eugene Sledge
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8
Collections: Sledgefu Week 2020





	1. Chapter 1

Hillbilly's chest started bleeding again as they made their way across Texas.  
"Hell," he said, the wind whipping his voice away and his hair wild around his face. He set his guitar secure between the casket and the side of the truck, pulled the cloth of his shirt away from his body with a frown.  
"Here," Jay said, shifting over to help him with the dressing.  
"I'm obliged." He pulled his shirt off with awkward, stiff movements, taking care to keep it clear of the blood. Jay's body blocked Eugene's view, not that he much wanted to see it anyway. He looked through the window of the truck, but could scarcely make Snafu and Bill out through the sticky grime clouding the glass, dust and dirt in so many ancient layers that it became repugnant to the touch, like days old dead flesh, or the heavy, familiar weight of the stock of a gun. He watched the casket instead, fighting not to wince each time the truck bumped and made the box jump in place, slamming back down reproachfully against the metal bed.   
"Here he comes." Eugene looked up at Jay's words. Hillbilly's shirt was back on, and he and Jay were both leaning against the side of the truck, looking out at something. Someone. The truck slowed to a stop, Snafu not bothering to pull to the side. Cars rushed by them in roars and shrieks and sudden bursts of wind that made the truck shift on its wheels, but none of that mattered. Eugene watched Burgie make his way across a scrubby field, lifting his hand in greeting as he drew closer.   
"Took you long enough," Bill called from the cab of the truck.   
"There weren't no rush," Burgie answered. He put his hand along the side and jumped into the back, settling down next to Eugene. He stared at the coffin for a moment, then stretched his legs out as far they could go without coming in contact with it. "Sledge," he said, not looking away.   
"Glad you're coming along, Burgie," Eugene said. Burgie only scoffed, his lips flattening.  
"Like I'd end up anywhere else." He lifted his gaze, looked around him as they gained speed, the heat making the air shimmer, casting the landscape in rippling waves of _greengold_ and _brownred_ and _blueblueblue_. "Gonna miss it though. The sky, y'know? We've been halfway round the world, and I still ain't found anything to equal it." He lifted a hand, gestured. "The way it spreads out and stretches itself down to meet the land, and all some distance so far away it might as well be some other world."  
"Maybe it is," Jay said mockingly. "Maybe we're going there."  
"Maybe you'll come back here some day," Eugene tried.  
"No," Burgie said after a moment. Eugene wasn't sure which of them he was answering. "I don't think so."  
They drove on.

* * *

  
They each took a turn behind the wheel, everyone except Hillbilly; none of them would dream or dare to suggest he move from his spot at the foot of the casket. Eugene drove as the sun burned itself down behind them, an unforgiving red that poured across the surface of the truck's black-speckled mirrors, so that all he could see was the road ahead, the world behind them consumed. He glanced to the side, over at Snafu.  
"They're still there," he said, as if he knew what Eugene was thinking.   
"You didn't look."  
"The fuck would they go, anyway?" Snafu said derisively.  
"Something's wrong with Jay." Snafu threw him a cutting look, a smile all sharp edges. Eugene didn't know what it meant. He'd watched him and watched him and thought until he wore himself away to nothing, and he'd never once understood what Snafu meant. "Forget it," he muttered.  
"Should stop for the night," Snafu said.  
"Why? I can drive through."  
"Just stop," Snafu said, shifting in his seat.  
Eugene found a camping ground to stop at shortly after dark, and the six of them sat together around the empty pit, littered with the old wet ash of the previous users. It was blaringly hot, Eugene couldn't understand the number of fires flickering around them, throwing out needless heat. Folk would hold on to their damn rituals; a little fire to drive away the dark, to drive away all those things that only the black of night could show a man. Voices drifted to them along with the sweet-smelling smoke, lifted high with good humor, joy. And here they sat around an empty circle, locked in silence.  
"When's the last time we were all together like this?" Bill said suddenly.  
"God, Leyden." Jay's voice was tight.   
"Just makes the rest of it seem pretty fucking meaningless. Like we coulda been like this a long time ago, and instead we went and-"  
"And what?" Burgie snapped. "You'd better quit."   
"You're saying you liked it out there?" Jay said, almost talking over Burgie.  
"Easy," Hillbilly said. They quieted. Eugene pushed his shoulder against Snafu, just a slender, unsettled line of heat at his side in the dark. Snafu grunted and stood up, and Eugene followed after him, walking away and into the pine trees. They stood politely spaced apart as pine trees tended to do, so that it was easy to make their way between those long thin trunks, picking their feet up to avoid stumbling on the undergrowth.   
When they got a little distance away, Eugene pulled Snafu to him, pushed his chin up with a hand on his jaw and bit him hard on his neck. Snafu sighed and loosened, leaning into him for a moment. Then he pulled away. Eugene let him go, and they went on walking.  
"Do you remember that reunion?" Eugene asked.  
"Sure I do."  
"You remember, we were standing outside, and you were wearing a white shirt, you'd left your coat for some reason-"  
"-Jesus, Sledgehammer."  
"-and I asked you if you'd been happy. You remember that?" Snafu didn't answer, just like then, walked alongside him in stony silence. "You just stared at me like I'd sprouted two heads."  
"Happy," Snafu said, twining the word up with disdain. "The fuck does that even mean? No, I wasn't goddamn happy. Wanted to snap your neck when you asked me that." He stopped suddenly, and so Eugene stopped. "Were you?" He asked accusingly. Eugene knew he would take it like an insult, no matter which answer he gave.  
"I guess," he said, shrugging a shoulder. "Happy enough." He tried not to frown, then remembered Snafu couldn't see it anyways. "I was happy," he said, trying to infuse the words with certainty. Snafu made a noise in his throat and turned around, walking back the way they'd come. Eugene trailed behind him. "Were you happy over there?"  
"Which there we talking about?"   
"Don't do that."  
They didn't speak again until they reached the edge of the pine trees. Snafu stopped walking, Eugene could hear him patting around in his pockets.  
"I'd kill for a smoke."  
"You could smoke if you wanted."  
"It ain't the same." He turned in suddenly to face him. "I was happy enough."  
Eugene reached out and touched his arm. "Bill shouldn't of said that. Not to them."  
"Yeah."  
"But." He hesitated, drummed his fingers restlessly against his arm and then let his hand drop away. "But I know what he means."  
"Yeah," Snafu said again, his voice thick.   
There was a stranger sitting in their spot when they got back. He wasn't alone: there were more of them, Eugene could feel them, but they were hanging back, letting the man speak on their behalf. He was talking to Hillbilly, gesturing with a hand. Eugene came and stood at Hillbilly's shoulder, Snafu at his side. Hillbilly was rubbing that spot on his chest, as if it was paining him again.   
"-no need to travel so far," the man was saying, as Eugene and Snafu drew near enough to hear. "You can choose where it ends."  
"That a fact," Hillbilly said flatly.  
"It is," the man answered. There was just enough light for Eugene to pick out his broader points. He was dressed strangely well, in a light coat with a long vest beneath. He had a large hat that he turned back and forth in his hands as he spoke. "That's what we've done." He gestured behind him, towards the silent, waiting crowd. "They forced us to leave, and I talked myself in circles trying to obtain permission to return." He shook his head. "Better to throw water at the sea. So we went without their blessing. It's the right of every free man to choose his home."  
"Even if someone's already living there?" Jay said darkly. "Isn't that what you really did? Ran off the ones that had been there first?"   
"You're too young to know," the man answered, a scowl in his voice. "It was my right. Didn't I suffer for it? Look at these hands." He held them up, but no one could see them in the dark. "We kept peace with them as we could. And what is this, this first? They would tell you themselves that they had come from elsewhere, that the land wasn't theirs to claim." He gestured towards the trees. "Ask them, they say it still."   
"Why're you here, if you say you went back?" Bill said. "Don't you want to be there?"  
"Of course," the man said, sounding surprised. He paused for a moment, and when he spoke again he was hesitant, confused. "We're returning there. Not far now." He stood slowly. He waited a moment, standing tall and still in front of them. "Everywhere you find the marks of the one's who came before. This land has always called to the restless dreamers. They've tread back and forth across its length and breadth, and only a fortunate few found what they were seeking. The rest wandered, and perished." He settled his hat back on his head. "If you find your destination unreachable, you are welcome to return home with us."  
"We're obliged," Hillbilly said. "But we ain't turning back." The man nodded and backed away, disappearing into the gloom. Eugene listened to the receding footsteps, a countless number of travelers.   
"Wonder if they'll get there," Burgie said.  
"Ain't made it yet," Snafu said.  
Later, they laid themselves down around the truck, not that any of them would sleep, but even they had rituals that they hadn't let go of. And Eugene was tired, and it felt good to lay shoulder to shoulder with Snafu again.  
"Do you remember on Okinawa," he said, "when we would lay on that rock at night?"  
"Why you doing this?" Snafu said.  
"You remember, you would make up constellations? Each idea dumber than the last."  
"Goddamn you."  
Eugene rolled over, slid his hand up Snafu's shirt, feeling along his ribs and chest. He was skinny, and hard, and hardly there at all. He'd always seemed a step away from up and disappearing, smoke wisping to nothing, starved as he had been of everything a human needed to thrive. Eugene lay his head down against his chest.  
"It's funny," he said.  
"What?"  
"How I can hear your heart."

* * *

  
They crossed into Louisiana the next day, and Snafu changed, grew more chipper and more mean, picking endlessly at Jay.  
"Don't gotta be here, y'know. Ain't no one forcing you."  
"Go to hell, Snafu."  
"You weren't cut out for it, no how. That's why they moved you out." Jay's eyes went tar-dark. "Hillbilly snapped you in half."  
"Give it a rest," Eugene said, glancing over at Hillbilly. He was looking back and forth between them, frowning.  
"Just the truth, Sledgehammer. He'd gone on to Okinawa, he'd a sunk down in the mud and stayed there." Snafu leaned back, his elbow and shoulder digging into Eugene, his eyes locked on Jay. "It's cuz we know, huh? That's why you won't leave. Why you been looking at us all hateful."  
"That's enough, Shelton," Hillbilly said. "He's earned it. Didn't he bleed?"  
But none of them had bled quite like Hillbilly.

* * *

  
They had to stop in the middle of the day, when a long line of travelers emerged from the slough and made their way across the road, heedless of how Bill braked with a jolting lurch and laid his hand heavy down on the horn. They were dark-skinned, glowing with the heat, dressed exceedingly simply, with light woolen shawls wrapped around their shoulders. Their eyes stayed trained ahead of them, but one man slowed and turned his head just slightly, a bold nose, a ravaged face. Bill stopped honking.  
"Don't look back," he said, his voice a clear cold bell. "The way will close if you look back." He walked on, his face set steadfastly forward. Eugene looked to either side of the road. They seemed to have emerged from the stagnant water, and disappeared just as effortlessly into the wet pines on the other side.   
"Hear that, De L'Eau," Snafu said. "You want out, gonna have to walk backwards all the way."  
Jay glared at him, and then at Eugene. Then he turned his head, looked purposefully behind him. "I'm coming with you," he said grimly. Snafu grinned. The last woman stepped clear of the truck, and they continued on.

* * *

  
They drove straight into a summer storm, hot fat rain pouring down on them in a sudden deluge. Up front with Snafu, Eugene twisted around and peered through the smeared window. Jay and Bill were huddled in on themselves, shoulders hunched and heads ducked down into the shell of their bodies. Burgie and Hillbilly were half-sprawled across the coffin, trying to protect it from the rain.   
"Think we should stop?"   
"You see any kinda place?" Snafu said poisonously. They went on for a time, Eugene squinting out through the gray streaming curtains, until, like an answered prayer,  
"There," he said, pointing to a barn off in the distance. The remains of a house sat next to it, half fallen in on itself, gray clapboard and exposed innards. It had caught fire at some point, and one end was blackened, with dark fingers stretching out along the rest of it. But the barn looked solid enough.  
"Nah," Snafu said. "S'no good."  
"It is," Eugene insisted. He looked at Snafu; his jaw was set square and hard, he was staring fixedly forward. "We gotta get him outta the rain, Snaf. It'll soak through, he'll start to stink."  
"He's already stinking."  
"We're gonna start to smell it." Everything started swimming, sinking down, and him along with it. His chest ached for a breath he couldn't pull in. Jesus, when was the last time he'd had one of these? He thought he'd left that behind him. "He'll smell like, he'll smell-"  
"Alright, fucking hell, Eugene," Snafu bit out. He whipped the wheel around, drove them straight into the overgrown field, towards the barn, the tall grass thrashing down beneath them, the coffin clattering in the bed loud enough for them to hear it in the cab. Eugene leaned his head forward against the dash and sucked in big, shuddering breaths. "I ain't going in that damn house."   
"No one's asking you to," Eugene ground out.  
At the barn, Eugene got out to open the half-hanging doors, and Snafu drove the truck straight inside.   
"Help me get him up outta the truck," Hillbilly said. His hair was ropey with the wet, the front of his shirt was one long red stain.  
"You're bleeding again," Bill said.  
"It'll keep."   
They lifted the casket free, set it carefully down in the barn's sturdiest corner. Burgie sat Hillbilly on top of it and made him strip his shirt while the rest of them opened the tailgate and bounced along the back to drain the water out.  
"How's the guitar, Jay?"  
"Wet." Jay carried it over to Hillbilly, who cradled it in his lap and wiped it down with dry handfuls of straw.  
"What d'you wanna hear?" He asked, not looking up.  
"You never displeased, didn't matter what you played," Burgie answered. Hillbilly almost smiled. He started up a tune, and Eugene walked over to the open door to stand beside Snafu. He was leaning against the frame, looking towards the house.  
"Can't be here, Sledge." Eugene looked at him. His eyes were wide and blankly silvered. He was staring at the house like it might be a train barreling down on him.  
"Okay." Eugene took him by the wrist. "Let's go."  
Snafu lightened and loosened as they walked away from the house, the barn. It was still pouring rain, but that only made him tip his head back, smiling as if the clinging wet hadn't ever cracked him, cracked them both.  
"Run all around these parts, when I was small," he said eventually, lowering his head and giving it a wild shake. "Close enough to these parts, at least." Eugene was still holding him by his wrist; he lifted his arm up and pressed his nose and mouth against the bones there, long and fragile, the veins running thick and strong beneath the surface.   
"Tell me about it."  
"Nothing to tell. Ma worked for a sharecropper, cotton mostly. She was always hauling me along after her, but I shirked it soon as I could each day. My old man worked some, but he spent most of his time chasing down some big idea or other that never shook out. Then the whole place folded, and we couldn't stay, and we ended up-" he stopped abruptly. Eugene waited until they cleared the field, their feet finding a neglected dirt road. They turned down it, the mud sucking at their boots.   
"None of it was any good?" Snafu slanted a look at him from the corner of his eye.  
"Ain't saying that. S'alright. Daddy liked to hunt, and he'd take me along. I liked being on the water."  
"Which way?"  
He stopped and looked around, like he'd be able to tell by the direction the trees leaned, by the curve of the road. "C'mon."  
Eugene followed him down the lane, and over a weathered, broken down wooden fence. They moved beneath trees, the rain coming down in patches on them now, the green almost sickening, surrounding them like it was, an unkillable creature. It was a clutching kind of green, the kind that wrapped itself tight around any foothold it could find and strangled and choked. Snafu pulled his wrist free of Eugene's hold, lifted it up and gripped him by the back of his neck. His hand was hard, reassuringly rough.   
They reached the marsh's edge, and Snafu toed out of his boots, waded in until the fetid, mossy water had covered his ankles.   
"You remember on the train?" He asked. He didn't turn around.  
"Yeah."  
"You sat right there, and I sat right there, and we just blinked at each other like a couple a cows." Eugene watched him, his form nearly lost in his baggy shirt and trousers, weightless enough to lift away, or slide down into the water without so much as rippling the surface. "You think I was yellow?"  
"No." He frowned, stared down at Snafu's abandoned boots. "Maybe. If you were, I was too."  
"Guess we used it all up, huh? Threw it all away on killing, so that there weren't nothing to draw from when it came down to it."  
"I dunno. Maybe we knew even then."  
"I sure as hell didn't." He looked to the side with a sudden jerk of motion, and Eugene followed his gaze. There was woman making her way towards them, walking along the rushes at the water's edge.  
"What you come for?" She asked, rich-voiced. She was long-faced and sinewy thin, her hair barely contained against the back of her head. She was wearing a plain, shapeless shirt dress.  
"Not for you," Snafu answered, hostile. "You can walk on."  
"Walk on?" She repeated, smiling. "You come to my water." She drew closer, her eyes shifting from Snafu over to Eugene. "I done run out the one before. He's still walking, but I ain't unkind. I blessed him 'fore he went so that his feet wouldn't never lead him back to his old ways." She stopped a few paces away, lifted a hand and crooked a long, bony finger at Eugene. "C'mere, boy."  
"Don't," Snafu said. "She's an old witch."  
"No one's talking to you," the woman said to him, her eyes locked on Eugene. "You ain't got no respect. Never gave it, never got it. Not like this sweet child." She motioned to Eugene again. "You c'mere. I got something here for you." Eugene came to her, Snafu muttering behind him, stood in front of her. She reached a hand into her pocket. "You come a decent way, but got further to go. But they cruel out here. You can't know 'less you lived on my side of it. Take this." And she pulled something free, a small brown bag, knotted closed with a simple leather cord. Her eyes were black, black enough to swallow the world. The sounds of the marsh seemed to heighten and pull in around them, like she was sucking in the pattering rain on the water's surface, the bird calls and the sobbing insects.  
"You ain't rooting him," Snafu said, suddenly beside him, yanking on Eugene's arm hard enough to make him stumble, fall in against him for a moment. "Anyway, he's already got one." He reached into the collar of Eugene's shirt, pulled out his cross and showed it to the woman.  
"Him?" The woman said with a cracking laugh. "Don't you know he's gone? Cleared outta these parts a long time ago. Washed his hands a us, that's what they say." She leaned forward, dropped her voice. "But you know, I think he left 'cuz we was drawing too close to his name."  
"You're lying," Eugene said, angry, pulling free of Snafu. She just smiled and returned the brown bag to her pocket.  
"You might could make it. That one's gone, but you boys've got another hand over you." She backed away until she was standing in the water, her eyes circling the air around them. She nodded. "A strong hand, a kind hand. You might could make it."  
"C'mon," Snafu said, pulling on Eugene. They backed away, the woman watching them go, deep-eyed, the edge of her dress floating on the scummy water.  
"Thank you," Eugene said, and she dipped her chin.  
"You a sweet one. Got a good, strong hand over you both." They didn't turn their backs on her until she was out of sight.

* * *

  
The rain finally let up that night, and they all walked together out into the field and collapsed on their backs, their faces turned up towards a fat yellow moon, hanging low enough in the sky that Bill reached a hand out to it. Even Hillbilly had felt its call, had left his spot beside the coffin to lay out under the clear light. Eugene was soaked through all along his back, but he was warm, and Snafu's arm was pressed beside his on the sodden grass, and Bill was on his other side, tugging wearily on his lip.  
"Christ, I'm tired," he huffed. Eugene hummed in agreement, and they lay together in the quiet for a moment, and then Bill spoke again. "I mean it, you know. You guys don't have to agree with me or nothing, but this was the only damn thing that ever mattered to me."  
"Okay, Bill," Burgie said gently.  
"Why's it so fucking beautiful?" Jay said.  
"Harvest moon, ain't it?" Burgie said.  
"I dunno," Eugene answered. "Don't think it's the right time of year." Snafu snorted, and then Jay snickered, and then they were all laughing, breathlessly wheezing, Snafu rolling over and burying his grinning mouth against Eugene's shoulder. The moonlight was pouring down on them all clean and golden, so that they didn't notice at first how an orange glow had started to rise up and out from the earth.  
"What is that?" Jay said, and even as he spoke Hillbilly was lurching to his feet with a strangled curse, was running back towards the barn.  
"It's burning," Burgie said, jumping up, the rest of them tumbling after him.  
It was already licking greedily along the walls, smoke rolling out in waves around it. Eugene couldn't understand how it had grown so quickly, how they hadn't heard it before, talking like it was as it ate its way across the barn. And the wood had been soaked through from the rain, it was unnatural, it wasn't right. Hillbilly had already disappeared through the doors, and Snafu peeled away from Eugene's shoulder, and Eugene looked over to see him making to run in the other direction. He reached out and snagged him by his elbow.  
"Gonna collapse," Snafu said, but he was looking at the house. That was when Eugene realized that the house was burning too.  
"Jesus, don't go in there." He pulled, and Snafu struggled against him. "Snaf! We gotta get the casket, the truck." He shook him, and Snafu glared at him, his eyes wild, gone, and then he cursed and shrugged Eugene off and plunged into the barn.  
The others were dragging the casket towards them, bent low against the thick gray smoke. It had caught fire at the foot, where Hillbilly tended to sit. Burgie glanced up. "Get the truck." Snafu ducked past them and Eugene followed after. He could scarcely see Snafu as he opened the truck door and jumped inside, not with how roiling thick and gray the air had grown. He could scarcely hear the sound of the engine starting up over the growing voice of the fire. Eugene glanced to the side, saw Hillbilly's guitar laying untouched on the bare dirt. He snatched it up and ran after the truck as Snafu drove it backwards through the doors.   
Outside, Bill and Burgie had whipped off their shirts and were using them to beat out the fire on the casket. Eugene looked towards the truck. It was still running, the door hanging open. Snafu was gone.  
"Oh, God." He looked towards the house. Had the doorway been open before? Had there ever been a door there in the first place? "God." He dropped the guitar and ran. The smoke was billowing out through the gaping doorway, the crumbling roof. Eugene fought back images of crawling, scrabbling men streaming fire and screams, and threw himself inside.  
It was a small house, more a shack than anything else, so he didn't understand why he couldn't find Snafu, even with the way the heat was making the air haze and turning everything so hellish bright that he could hardly see. He stumbled through rooms, over crumpled walls and burning detritus, yelling for him with his arm up over his mouth, his streaming eyes. But Snafu didn't answer. Eugene couldn't find him.   
"Don't do this, don't fucking do this," he muttered under his breath, ready to drop down and let it fall on him, ready to pull the place apart one scorching beam at a time until he reached him, and then he saw him, crouched in front of a pile of burning wood, his shirt up over his nose and mouth. He was shifting through the pieces, throwing them aside with furious intent, heedless of the fire. His hands were, his hands - "Jesus Christ," Eugene said, almost falling against him. He wrapped an arm around his chest, hauled him back. Snafu tried to pull free, raised one of his ruined hands up to try and tug Eugene's arm off of him. Eugene's stomach heaved, and he wrapped his other arm around his waist. "Damn you, goddamn you."  
"She's under there, she's under there," Snafu was saying, chanting. "Get off, help me, she's under there." He had always been stronger than he looked, and he was wild now as he fought against him, but somehow Eugene managed to slowly pull him away, latching on to that old desperate feeling that he had never been able to forget or let go of, clutching Snafu to him as they stumbled backwards together. And then Burgie was there, and suddenly it was just a shack again, and Burgie grabbed on to Snafu by his kicking feet and together he and Eugene managed to carry him bodily out the door.  
Eugene fell backwards with Snafu on top of him, and Snafu elbowed him in the ribs and kicked hard against his legs and thrashed his limbs to get free, and all Eugene could do was grit his teeth and cling on to him. "Snaf," Burgie said somewhere above them. "Stop it, goddamn it."   
"You sons a bitches," Snafu said, still struggling. "You fucking sons a bitches." Then he stopped, collapsing boneless against Eugene, the back of his skull knocking painfully against his nose. "The hell wouldn't you help me, Gene? Why didn't you help me?" Eugene didn't answer, just slid himself out from under him and helped Burgie drag Snafu further away from the house, the fire roaring as it glutted itself on the broken remains.  
"Oh," was all Jay could say, when he ran to help them, and got a look at Snafu's hands. "Oh, Christ."   
"Shut up," Eugene grated. He was easily moved now between the three of them, sliding listless along the grass until they reached the truck, the coffin. They let him go, stood sentry over him to make sure he didn't try to get back up. Eugene could hardly stand to look at him. Hillbilly moved away from the casket, blackened and singed thin along its foot but still whole, came and knelt down by Snafu. He took him by his elbows, looked his hands over carefully.  
"You don't go alone, Shelton. You know that." Snafu turned his face to the side and Hillbilly laid a hand along his forehead. "We'll have to wait and see." Eugene looked over at the barn. It was throwing heat and angry light every which way, the fire billowing out in plumes as the walls slowly collapsed.   
"How the hell did it even start?" Bill asked, standing beside him.  
"I shouldn't a left him alone," Hillbilly said.  
"Did you do it, Gene?" Eugene looked down at Snafu. The fire was making him glow the way any sort of warm light always had, like it was pulling something out that lived just beneath the surface of his skin.   
"No."  
"You wanted to burn him up so you wouldn't have to smell him. Wanted to burn them all up so I wouldn't have nothing but you."  
"No, Snafu." He didn't know what else to say. Snafu sat up, stood up, holding his hands against his chest. He looked at the house for a long moment, then turned and walked away, across the wet dark field.  
"C'mon, Jay," Burgie said, and he and Jay set off after him, trailing a distance behind. Eugene walked over to the coffin, knelt beside it and fell forward so that his chest and arms and the side of his face were pressed against the wood. There was a fire burning red behind his eyes.   
"He was just talking," Bill said, standing over him. "Like he always does."  
"I wouldn't do that to him. I wouldn't do that to _him_."  
"We all know it, Sledge," Hillbilly said. Eugene spread his hands out wide and flat along the coffin.  
"I would never do that," he said to it, the wood growing wet again beneath his face.

* * *

  
No one asked them to drive that next day, not that Snafu could with his hands contracted and clawed like they were. The two of them sat next to the coffin, turned in towards each other. Eugene cradled Snafu's forearms in his lap, curled himself over them and kissed the blistered, cracked skin. Snafu leaned against his shoulders and didn't speak or look at him, stared dull-eyed at nothing.   
The land rolled up and they twined their way through it, their progress slowed by how all the roads wound around the rising foothills. Everything would take longer now, Eugene knew, as they started picking their way north. He felt a tugging in his chest, the persistent call of home, trying to pull him back in. Had Burgie felt this as they left Texas, had Snafu felt it as they cut their way through Louisiana? He tried to ignore it, kept his eyes trained on Snafu's hands.  
"Why aren't they getting any better?" He asked Snafu, late that night. They had found another campground to stop over at, and Snafu and Eugene hadn't joined the others when they climbed out of the truck and went to sit around another empty fire. They stayed as they were, folded together beside the coffin. "Don't know what else I can do to make them better."  
"Cuz it ain't got nothing to do with you," Snafu said, finally speaking.  
"How the hell are we gonna get there, if wanting a thing this badly can't make it happen?"  
"It'd of all gone different, if wanting was all it took." Eugene lifted his head. It was too dark to see him, but he could feel him, feel him coming back. "Shouldn't of said any of that shit, Eugene."   
"It doesn't matter." Snafu dropped his head down against his shoulder. "I'm thinking about going back, one last time." He felt him go still, pressed his cheek against his temple. "Will you come with me?"  
"Always wanted to see it," Snafu said after a moment. They stood up and stepped down off the truck, set their feet south and started walking.  
They walked along the edge of a river, because Snafu seemed to travel most swiftly with his bare feet in the water. If he was alone, Eugene felt certain he could reach the sea in two long steps, but they made their way well enough, eating up miles with each stride. The river narrowed and quickened, widened and slowed, and it was beautiful, and when they passed towns and folk called out to them to stop a while and hear their stories, Snafu would sneer and Eugene would lift an apologetic hand, and they didn't stop for any of them. Maybe that was all they were anymore, Eugene reflected. Stories aching to be told. He wondered if he was a different story from Snafu, or if they could even be told separately, or where one story could begin to unknot itself from the other without losing its heart.   
When they had traveled south enough for him to pick up the scent of the ocean in the air, Eugene pulled Snafu inland, everything familiar now, God, it would be so easy to stay, to not go back. They stopped eventually in a gently rolling field blanketed in knee-high grass. It rustled beneath them as they lay back against it, shifting close to each other. The fireflies were out, glowing fitfully all around them and along the edges of the trees. Eugene remembered taking his boys out one evening, mason jars and sweet, open voices, meeting Sid and his two sons in a similar field. It might have been this same field. They had stood together and watched their boys run around in the gloom, each bug caught a separate marvel, the magic feeling growing as the blinking lights in their jars grew denser, glowing against small palms. He and Sid had grinned at each other, and in that moment Eugene had been happy, so damn happy. It had been a good life, despite the gaping hole at the center of it.  
And where was Sid? Where was his mother and father, his brother? Eugene fiddled with the cross around his neck, hearing that woman's voice again, _don't you know he's gone?_ He wondered if he would ever see them again. But he supposed they had all made their choices. In the end, everything got whittled away until the only things left were the hardest truths, carved into the core with sharp blades.  
"Fucking bugs," Snafu said, but he didn't sound annoyed, thoughtful rather. "Dancing and crying 'til they die."  
"You remember the train?"  
"Already asked you that one."  
"You know, I almost said something. I almost said a lot of things."  
"Almost," Snafu said mockingly.  
"What would we have done, if I'd said it? If you'd said it?"  
"Don't know," Snafu said after a long pause. "S'not like it was near the end there, people just out and saying it, living it. We'd a been alone. Would've had to hide it all the time. Lie and lie."  
"But I did that already. Hid it, and hid it, and lied. And missed you."  
"Don't, Eugene."  
"Did it ever get any easier for you?"  
"Fuck you. You think I'd be here if it got easier?" Eugene rolled into him, pulled him closer by a hand on his waist. What would he have tasted like, if he'd kissed him like this when they were living? Here, he was dark, and thick with heat and smoke. Would he have responded this same way, surprisingly soft, if Eugene had dared to kiss him back then? Eugene dragged his mouth down along his throat, his chest. He'd always assumed death would put an end to this unappeasable need, but it seemed the only thing that it had ended was that hateful voice that told him all the reasons why it was wrong, impossible.  
"It didn't get any easier for me, either," he said against Snafu's ribs. "Felt like my heart was gonna give out, when I saw you again at that reunion. You were like a stranger, and then you were the same." Snafu sighed and pulled on his arms until Eugene slid back up and bumped their foreheads together.  
"Thought about not going," he said reluctantly. "Didn't want to see you looking old. Didn't want to know if your eyes had changed." He put his hand along the side of Eugene's face, and Eugene turned his head to press his lips against his palm, then paused, pulled back.  
"Huh," he said, taking Snafu by his wrist.  
"What?"  
"Your hand looks better." Snafu grunted a laugh, Eugene didn't know what it meant, and rolled them over, reversing their positions. He held Eugene by his jaw with both his hands, dipped his face down so that their noses barely brushed.  
"Sledgehammer," he muttered, low and gruff, and then they stopped speaking.  
Hours later, they sprawled out across the grass, sated and fed. The fireflies were long gone, the stars fading as the sun started to cast itself pink along the top of the trees. "You'll have to help me back," Eugene said. "It's hard to pull away."  
"Always did have to haul you along," Snafu said. He climbed to his feet, pulling Eugene up after him. Eugene took one last look around. It was the most beautiful place in the world, in every world, that was all there was to it. His home. But that was over now. He'd given it his life, left it his body; that would have to be enough. All the rest belonged somewhere else. He twisted Snafu's fingers up tight with his, and let him drag him away. North.


	2. Chapter 2

"You know what I don't get," Bill said, leaning back against the gate of the truck. "Why my fucking finger's still missing."  
"Don't nothing make sense out here," Snafu said.  
"It does," Eugene argued. "It's just twisted." He looked at the passing scenery. They were following along the edge of a valley, low mountains rising up around them, covered in trees, covered in mist. "Circles around to it instead of taking a straight line."  
"We're gonna have to cross the gap," Hillbilly said, eyeing the ridges. "Thought we could just follow along through the valley, but that ain't gonna get us there."  
"How you know that?" Snafu asked. Hillbilly just frowned and looked down at the casket.  
"I can come at it straight or sideways, and I still don't get what one little finger's got to do with anything," Bill said.  
"Well it must mean something, or else you wouldn't be talking about it so damn much," Eugene said wearily. Bill scowled.  
"Gap's gonna be packed full, just you wait," Snafu said darkly. "They're gonna be gathered up around it like flies on shit."  
"Well, and ain't we just the same?" Hillbilly said. He put his hand along the coffin's blackened edge. "We're not the only ones traveling."  
They had to slow to a crawl as they entered the gap, as the road narrowed and coarsened and traffic along it grew thicker. "Don't talk to any of 'em," Hillbilly warned, but even he leaned his elbow along the side of the truck to watch. They were on foot and on horseback, in wagons and vehicles of every style, and all of them traveling somewhere else. Eugene watched a regiment of gray-coated soldiers march along in loose formation, weary-eyed, rifles in hand. They didn't look back, or seem to see anything around them at all. He watched a woman draw closer to the truck, her dress shapeless and undyed, her boots worn. "We on our way," she said to him. "My babies gonna know a different life." But she was alone. Eugene could scarcely stand to look her in the eye.   
"Seems like nobody ever made it," he said, watching her as she walked away.  
"Sure they did," Bill said. "That's why they aren't here."  
The road slowly widened and modernized, and Burgie picked his way through the last of the wagons and drove them out of the crowd. "Should be a straight enough shot now," Hillbilly said, as the truck turned north and east and they resumed their way along the edge of another valley. He was watching the peaks again; his eyes had been swinging back and forth between the coffin and the ridges for days now. "They sure do work into you. The way they call you on and on, a man can't help but climb 'em. Then you get to the top, and what do you find?"  
"More mountains," Bill said.   
"Finds out he shouldn't a fucked with it to start," Snafu said. "Now he's gotta go back down."  
"I sure as hell never found it," Hillbilly said, his gaze dropping back down to the casket. "You boys've better brace yourselves. That one's growing up a storm."  
"How can you tell?" Eugene asked, looking at the peak he'd been watching. There were some clouds, but they were thin and distant, the sky above them chalk-blue.   
"Just that kinda day."   
Hillbilly was right, of course. Only a few hours later Snafu hooked a finger through Eugene's belt, and Eugene pressed their hips and legs together as they listened to the mountain start to grumble, watched it gather up clouds like a woman gathering up her billowed skirts. Then the lightning started in, cracks of blue slicing through roiling gray. It stayed tightly contained along the mountain's peak for the most part, but Eugene watched the stray bolt shoot down towards the earth from the storm's outer edge. They were traveling close enough to that edge to have them all scooting closer to the coffin, as if hope and devotion could serve to divert the storm's uncaring hand. But it passed as swiftly as it had grown, the clouds seemingly swept away by nothing other than their own angry rolling, the lightning flickering out.  
"Why the hell would anyone ever live out here?" Bill said incredulously, after the sky reclaimed its blue and the rumbling of the storm faded until they were left with the reassuring sounds of their own movement; wind roaring past the truck, the clatter of the casket and the engine.   
"It's the land," Hillbilly said. "Works into you." He pointed in front of them, over the hood of the truck. "See that one? With the clouds?"  
"Yeah," Eugene answered, lifting up with a hand on Snafu's shoulder. It was far enough away to be almost lost to the distance and its own misty shrouding, but it was taller than the surrounding peaks, significantly so. Maybe that was why they could pick it out, even from here.  
"That's the one," Hillbilly said. "That's where we're taking him."  
They had it in mind to drive straight through the night; none of them slept anymore, despite their growing exhaustion. All that mattered was getting there. But Burgie stopped unexpectedly that evening, the car slowing to a halt in the middle of the road. Jay leaned his head out the window. "Looks like the bridge washed out."  
"How in the hell," Hillbilly growled, and they all climbed out of the truck, circling around it to get a better look.  
"Was it the storm?" Eugene asked, staring down at the crumbled bridge. It was mostly submerged in the water, slabs of concrete and twisted iron beams all that remained.   
"Don't see how," Snafu answered.  
"It means something," Jay said. "What the fuck does it mean?"  
"I don't give a damn what it might mean," Hillbilly grated out. "We're getting him there. There's gotta be another way across."  
"River has to end eventually," Bill said. But nothing was certain here.  
They drove east along the river, watching the bank stretch on and on, watching their mountain grow smaller in the distance as they drove further away from it. Snafu's hands started to tap against his knees, his gaze going fixed. Hillbilly stared down at the casket like he was waiting on it to give him some sort of answer.  
"Here we go," Bill said, pointing ahead. They had come to another bridge, smaller than the previous one, but still standing. Snafu stood up, Eugene grabbing him by his knee.  
"It's under the water," he said, and Hillbilly cursed.  
"Maybe we can still cross it," Eugene said doubtfully.  
A minute later they were standing in front of the bridge, the truck idling behind them. "Might could do it," Snafu said. The water was rushing swift over the bridge's surface, but it didn't seem too high.  
"Not tonight we ain't," Burgie said. "Light's nearly gone. We'll have to wait 'til morning to try it."  
"The bridge may clear," a voice said from behind them, startlingly close. Eugene's heart clenched; he turned to see a woman standing only a few feet away, dressed all in white. "Or it may collapse. It remains on my authority."  
"This your crossing?" Hillbilly asked. Her face was stiff, her expression blank as she looked at him. But her eyes were dark wells.   
"The bridge? That belongs to no one. Mine is the running water."  
"So you could make it go down," Bill said.  
"I could. I made it rise. I wanted you to come to me, and here you are."  
"What do you want," Jay asked flatly.  
"Come with me," she said, turning away. For a moment as she turned, her profile catching against the fading light, her cheek and eye lost to shadow, for just a moment she looked like, like- "Leave the coffin."  
"But you - " Jay said, starting to step after her, then stopping. His mouth twitched, his eyes were huge in his face. Eugene felt something trying to crawl up his throat.  
They stood and watched her disappear into the thick trees lining the road. "I'm not leaving him again," Hillbilly said.  
"You should stay," Burgie said. His jaw was tight as he stared after the woman. "We'll go. C'mon, boys."  
She was easily followed through the hemlocks, a beacon in white. Eugene had a feeling she had claimed more than the water; this whole forest was hers, or she at least walked through it with the sure stride of ownership. The sound and movement of the river fell away, the world turned still and quiet, their treading feet and tattered breathing the only sounds. Her home, when Eugene caught sight of it ahead, was just like her: lovely and lonely, lacking only in company. She left the door open behind her as she disappeared into the house.  
"What are we doing here?" Bill asked, hesitating along with the rest of them outside the entrance.  
"She won't lower the water 'til we give her what she wants," Burgie said grimly.  
"She hates me," Snafu said. "Always knew she hated me."  
"Why wouldn't she hate us?" Jay said  
"What are you talking about?" Bill said.  
"But what does she want?" Eugene asked. He felt that old guilt, God, nothing ended, it just went on and on. "I tried to give it to her." But he'd always known that he was failing her. He wanted to touch Snafu but couldn't. That old guilt.  
"What the hell are you guys talking about?" Bill said again.  
"Nothing for it but to face it," Burgie said, and stepped into the house.  
She was standing with her back to him when Eugene walked in. The chipped ceramic cup that she'd always preferred was in her hand, and she was using it to water the potted flowers that she kept in the window above the sink. "Sit down," she said to him, her voice warm now. "I remember. You always needed a moment with your pipe and your thoughts after coming home." Eugene looked at the chair, worn from his weight and faded from the abundant sunlight it received, turned as it was towards the window.  
"This isn't home," he said to her. "You're not my wife."  
"I am," she answered calmly. "You would tread more carefully, if you understood all that I am." She put the cup down, tested the soil with the pads of her fingers. "I gave my life to you, made your hurts and hopes my own. I loved you, and waited for you to love me back."  
"I did love you."  
"You loved what I gave you. Just like every other man."  
"That's not true. We were," he fumbled, his mind stuttering around words that didn't exist. What did you call a person you confided in but could never bare yourself to? Someone that you trusted, but never with the truth, all those hard truths. "We took care of each other, didn't we? I wanted you to be happy."  
"Oh, Eugene," she sighed. She turned around, came to him. It was easy to hold her, she had always been easy to touch. He felt a tug on his shoulder, heard a faint voice somewhere distant, but she was soft and solid, something real that he could turn to in the dark. "Sit down, love. I just want to be with you." Eugene sat down in the chair, and she sank to her knees in front of him and leaned her head against his leg. "You've seen how it is," she said, reaching up to take his hand. "These journeys have so many endings. This could be ours."  
"I can't stay." He leaned forward to kiss her fingertips. "I've got to go back."  
"You can choose me," she said insistently. "It haunted you all your life. Why are you choosing it over me?"  
"You don't understand." It didn't feel like a choice, but maybe that was because he had never doubted or denied to himself how it had grown up and rooted into his heart, his muscle and bone. The fear, the awful hate. The loyalty and love.   
"Tell me the truth. You liked it that way." She was changing again, stepping further away from the woman he knew. Her hands were claws. "You could have shared it with me, but you preferred me in a clean white space that you never sullied. You kept me in one room and the war in another, and that's why you could never love me." Eugene felt another tug on his shoulder, harder this time, _Gene Gene Gene_.   
"She deserved better than me," he said, trying to stand, trying to pull loose from her grip on him. "You're not her."  
"I'm her," she said, rising up after him. "I'm every woman a man made empty promises to. Will you really choose the war again, over her?"  
"It's not the war. It's them." He didn't know where it had begun. Maybe when he'd walked into the tent with Bill and Oswalt and they had looked up at him, and Snafu turned that wide sneering smile on him, or when two pairs of boots had appeared in front of him and he'd first heard his voice, _get up off my deck_. Or maybe it had been later, on the amtrac, when Snafu offered him that first cigarette and then threw up on his boots, or when the shaking earth had dropped him back down into the trench, and he stood frozen and grappling against the awesome fear that had been growing up monstrous inside of him, and he came back for him and held his hand out. "You don't understand."  
"Unfaithful," she spat, and then the hand on his shoulder yanked hard, and Eugene stumbled backwards into Bill.  
"Christ, what the fuck is going on," Bill said, shaking him. Eugene shrugged him off. The room was different now, dark and empty. Jay, Burgie and Snafu were standing silent in front of her, and she was muttering rapid and heated under her breath to them.   
"Help me," Eugene said, moving to Snafu.  
"Didn't I give myself to you," she was saying as Eugene drew near. "Gave you my body, gave you children and a loving home and fought against time and nature to keep you beside me - "  
"Snafu." He stepped in front of him, blocking her from his view, his skin prickling all over with the danger of turning his back on her. He put his hands on either side of Snafu's face and tried to make his eyes catch and latch on, but he was seeing something else. "C'mon. Come back." Snafu didn't respond. Bill was beside him, cursing desperately at Jay and Burgie.  
"But you kept each other on the altar," she went on chanting behind him. "Kept faith with grief and killing, kept it in your heart instead of me, and I grew old waiting for you to choose me, and I died waiting for you to choose me, and even here you try to turn away from me and go back - "  
"Goddamn you," Eugene said to her, to Snafu. "We're not staying here." He bit Snafu hard on the lip, bit down until he tasted blood. "Come back," he said around his clenched teeth, and Snafu shuddered and grabbed on to him. Eugene pulled back, found his eyes.  
"Eugene," he said. Eugene pulled him away, closer to Bill.  
"We gotta go, we gotta run for it," he said to him, letting go with one hand so he could take Jay by the shoulder and shake him hard. Snafu's eyes swung to the woman, then back to Burgie and Jay. He let go of Eugene, went to Burgie and forced him around to look at him.   
"Snap the fuck outta it, Burge. You already decided." He got a hand around the back of Burgie's neck and knocked their forehead's together, and Burgie pulled away from him, his eyes pained and wild.  
"Oh, God," he said. Then, "She'll destroy the bridge."   
"Let's go let's go let's go," Bill said, and they grabbed Jay, still listless, and dragged him towards the door. The woman screamed behind them, the weight of her voice enough to press their shoulders down, to have them huddling against each other as they ran. Jay crumpled halfway to his knees coming back to himself outside of the house, then picked himself up and ran with the rest of them through the dark trees, no white light to guide their way.  
"She said - " he started to say.  
"Don't," Burgie said swiftly, cutting him off. "You think she's anything to do with them? She's something else."  
The trees seemed to sway around them as they ran, the woman's voice howling down after them. "Just one," she shrieked. "I only need one."  
"What the fuck is going on?" Bill said again.  
They ripped through the edge of the trees and found Hillbilly waiting, a shadow pacing back and forth with the truck on and ready. "What the hell happened?"  
"Go, go," Burgie said, running past him and jumping behind the wheel, not bothering to close the door after him. The rest of them piled into the back of the truck, Eugene and Bill standing at the front to look over the hood towards the bridge. It was dark enough now that the water was just black movement.   
"Not too fast," Eugene said to Burgie, knocking on the hood.  
"You boys be ready to jump out," Burgie answered back.  
"Did it go up any?" Jay asked Hillbilly, crouched beside him next to the coffin. Hillbilly shook his head.  
"Dunno. It was calm enough, and then it started roaring."  
"It's up, no doubt," Snafu said, as Burgie pulled the truck forward and they eased onto the bridge. The truck shifted as they rolled into the water, but didn't lift. They churned their way through. "You got it, Burge," Snafu said, but Eugene doubted Burgie could hear him over the running water.   
"Crossing the middle now," Bill said, still standing beside Eugene, but then the woman's voice came screaming up from beneath them, and the water started to talk with a thousand voices, and there was an awful crack like the world splitting and giving out and Eugene realized as the truck lifted and started tilting that she had merely been waiting for the right moment. "Oh fuck oh Christ," Bill said.   
"Burgie get out," Eugene shouted and -   
"Get a hand on him, don't let him go," he heard Hillbilly say and -   
"Sledgehammer," Snafu yelled, and then Bill fell against him and he slammed into the side of the truck, and then the truck turned and kept turning and he was blind under the water, tumbling helplessly. He felt a hand, an arm, tried to latch on to it but it ripped from him and was gone. Something slammed into his other side, bore down on him, then started to lift up and away, and Eugene managed to twist and grab on, clung to it and let it pull him up.   
He broke the surface of the water and gasped in a breath, flailing a bit before throwing a hand over the coffin, because of course it was the coffin. He looked around, but was nearly as blind now as he had been under the water. An arm slapped down next to his along the wood. "Don't let him go," Hillbilly said, fierce.  
"Snafu," Eugene tried to shout, coughing instead. The water was moving them fast downriver, he could just make out the truck's headlights shining dim beneath the surface, rapidly receding. Something crashed against his legs, he felt an arm clutch on, nearly yanking him down. He thrust his hand down, grabbed and pulled, until they popped up out of the water and flung their arms around the casket.  
"Where's Hillbilly?" Jay croaked, spluttering, shaking.  
"Here," Hillbilly said. "Move, move, get him to shore." They strained together, trying to push against the current, trying to break free.   
"Where's the bank?" Jay said. "Where is everyone?"  
"Current's too strong," Eugene said.  
"Goddamn it," Hillbilly growled. "Don't you stop, I'll see us all to hell before I lose him to this goddamn river." They bent to it again, Eugene kicking with his legs, scrabbling for something to gain purchase against, but the water was too deep. But Hillbilly cursed them again, his voice a roar that even the angry chanting of the river couldn't drown out, and somehow they broke free of its sucking grip, made their slow, dragging way towards the water's edge. Their feet found the riverbed, they shoved the casket in front of them, and then someone started pulling from the other side.   
"Who is it?" A voiced asked, Bill's voice.  
"Three of us," Hillbilly answered. "Still missing Burgin and Shelton." Bill pulled on the coffin hard enough for them to nearly lose their grips, crawling their way up out of the water after it and collapsing down against the grass. Eugene gave himself three great, relieved breaths, and then he climbed back up, his sopping boots and clothing fighting against his movement.   
"Snafu," he called, his voice catching with weariness and fear. "Burgie." What if she had them, what if she was holding them down beneath the water?  
"Eugene." He turned towards his voice, stumbled his way along the bank until he found him, a hand coming up to the back of his neck, another one latching on to his arm.   
"Thank God," he said, his hands moving along him in the dark. "You're okay? Where's Burgie?"  
"I'm here," Burgie said, somewhere behind Snafu. "Did we - ?"  
"No, we got him out. We got him." He could hear Hillbilly behind him, the three of them working to drag the casket further up into the grass.  
"Truck's gone," Burgie said.  
"What'll we do?"  
"Guess we're carrying him the rest of the way."  
"Up a fucking mountain," Snafu said.  
"It was always gonna come to it," Burgie said, moving past them to join the others. Eugene took a moment to drop his head down against Snafu's neck, press his face against him, and then Snafu tugged on his arm and they followed after Burgie.  
"It's cracked along the burnt edge," Hillbilly said as they circled around the coffin, just shuffling movement and half-glimpsed silhouettes. "Half filled with water."  
"What do we do?" Bill asked.  
"Tilt it up and drain it," Hillbilly answered, tight-voiced. They fumbled around in the dark until they came across the body of a fallen tree, then dragged the coffin over and set it against it. Hillbilly collapsed back beside it with a quiet, "Fuck."   
"How's your chest?" Jay asked.  
"It's no bother. You boys get some rest if you can." They moved away, gave him a little space, collapsing together along the bank.  
"Damn that woman," Snafu said, leaning against Eugene.  
"We deserved it," Jay said. "Or I did, at least." They were quiet for a moment, and then he spoke again. "She was right. Everything she said was right. I loved her, but I think I always knew it'd end up this way. But, God, I loved her, I did." His voice cracked, Eugene listened to Bill shift closer to him.  
"It's not your fault," he said gruffly, awkwardly. "It never let any of us go."  
They curled in towards each other in the dark.

* * *

  
"Look." Bill lifted a hand away from the coffin for a moment so that he could gesture up at the sky, at the circling, wheeling shapes. "Two more now."  
"Stop counting them," Burgie said. "Don't make any difference how many there are."  
"Dead birds following after something twice dead," Bill said. "I never knew you could get more dead than dead."  
"You cracking up?" Snafu asked.  
"No. We've all been thinking it. We gotta get him there, but how come he's dead and we're." He hesitated. "Whatever the fuck we are? You seen any other dead bodies since we started out? Can we die again?"  
"Maybe we should test it," Jay snapped, without any real heat. They were worn through, and sleep was impossible.  
"Just tired of those vultures," Bill grumbled, working his shoulder more securely under the casket.   
"How's your chest, Hillbilly?" Eugene asked, glancing over his shoulder at him.   
"Fine," he answered shortly. "It's no bother." It was bleeding, Eugene didn't think it had stopped bleeding since they hefted the coffin on their shoulders and left the riverbank, but the blood was seeping instead of pouring. He glanced at Snafu, whose gaze flickered over to him and then away. Eugene didn't know what it meant. He looked down at his boots, then up at the sky, at the long-winged vultures. He didn't know how long they had been following after them, silent in flight, looming and somehow hunched even as they rode the warm air over their heads. Bill swore that he could hear them at night, hear the creak of their talons gripping nearby low limbs. Eugene tried to tell him that their feet didn't have a strong grip, weren't designed to grasp and squeeze, but Bill was stubbornly perverse, insisting he knew what he heard.   
"Wish I had my rifle," he said that night, leaning up against the coffin beside Eugene. "That would clear the fuckers off."  
"It wouldn't matter. A vulture can smell rot from a mile away." But it was strange, because Eugene still couldn't smell it, despite the crack running along the foot of the casket, despite the time and trials the body inside had been subjected to. Sometimes he caught a whiff of something, that redolent, complex stink that only a human body seemed capable of producing, but then it would be gone, and he couldn't tell if it had actually existed or if his mind had conjured it up. But why else were those vultures circling them?  
He couldn't think about it any more, and there wasn't any point to it, anyway. Eugene shifted halfway onto his side, tucking his shoulder between the casket and Snafu's body. He tipped his head back against the wood and closed his eyes and thought longingly of sleep until the sun pinked the air and they rose to their feet and resumed their journey.  
The mountain kept changing. At first it had been green foothills, the six of them stomping along the creek beds that wound between, picking their way through the birch and beech. But then the foothills coughed them out and they started climbing, and then it was all twisting narrow ways and sharp rock ridges that they had no choice but to follow alongside. It was familiar, too familiar. Eugene's eyes kept darting to the side, checking for bodies that weren't there. He scrubbed his free hand hard along his cheek but didn't find the clinging ash that he expected.  
"Hear that?" Snafu said, across the casket from him.  
"What?"  
"Gunfire."  
They stopped and dropped to their knees, the coffin on their shoulders a shield. Eugene ducked his face against the wood and listened.  
"There's nothing," Jay said.  
"I fucking heard it." Eugene believed him, Snafu had always been steady like that: alert, but never jittery with it.  
"Better move," Hillbilly said. "We're bracketed in here." He gestured up at the looming rock walls on either side of them. "Fish in the barrel. Gotta find a better position."  
"You think there's something up on the ridge?" Eugene asked. Hillbilly didn't answer, and they rose to their feet as one and started walking again.  
"No damn gun," Bill muttered in front of him. "No idea what's over the next crest. Japs have probably got this whole mountain mapped and pillboxed and here we are trudging along blind. Again."  
"Japs?" Jay said, his voice catching. "Where the hell do you think we are right now, Leyden?"  
Bill looked over his shoulder at him, across the length of the coffin. "Okinawa." His eyes narrowed with sudden doubt, he glanced at Burgie as if for confirmation.  
"I was thinking Gloucester," Burgie said, strangely apologetic. But it was Peleliu, Eugene thought wildly. It had to be Peleliu.  
"Jesus Christ," Jay said. "What mountain is this?"  
Every mountain, Eugene suspected.  
They didn't stop when the sun slipped away behind the rocks. There wasn't any rest to be found, and they didn't have any words for each other to fill the quiet. They walked straight through the night, slowly, feet faltering and stumbling in the dark, that same golden disc of a moon lighting their path. Eugene could see them now, if he cared to look. If he took his focus off each carefully planted step, if he turned his head to scan the spaces beside him, he knew he would see them: all the wearily climbing soldiers.   
"Didn't anyone go anywhere else?" He said, quietly, because they had all eventually heard what Snafu had first picked up: the distant rattle and pop of gunfire, faint shouts that seemed to echo and bounce off the rock.   
"I don't think so," Burgie said.  
"Only the ones that died straight off," Snafu said. "Caught it early on 'fore it got its teeth in." Eugene thought about Oswalt, gripped his cross and imagined him someplace vastly distant. Maybe there was swelling music, and sweet smells, and a soft bed to fall into and sleep, just sleep. Maybe there a man forgot what it meant to be afraid, and then, worse, what it meant to be dulled and dumbed by it so that nothing could be properly felt ever again. Eugene glanced across the coffin at Snafu, his jutting jawline and the slip of his nose, faintly picked out in the moonlight. He let go of the cross, returned his hand to the casket.  
In the morning their old expressions had come back to them, the ones they had worn near the end, when fatigue had won out over all the rest. Hate and fear and hunger could push you on, empty, a shell of a human, but the distant prize wasn't accolades or another mark claimed on the map. It was the chance to lay the burden down, to collapse beside it and close your eyes and let it all fall away from you. Eugene was longing for it, it was the only want he could remember, and he recognized it in Jay's dark, flat stare, in the tense line of Burgie's mouth. He recognized it in the way Snafu was watching him again, like he was ready to grab him by the elbow and haul him back up if he saw Eugene start to go down.   
They were nearing the summit. Eugene knew it by the cool snap in the air, how it seemed to roll up around them and then suddenly turn to rain. It was mercurial, the wind and the rain, but as they neared the peak it seemed to focus itself on them, blanketing them in dark clouds, discharging warnings in vein-like flashes. An indifferent god, just now noting their tread along its surface. It rumbled low, the sound seeming to come from the mountain itself, and then the rain began to fall in a blinding torrent.  
"Should we stop?" Burgie yelled over the grumbling storm and the hissing rain.  
"Keep going," Hillbilly yelled back. "This won't quit 'til we reach the top." Eugene tucked his head in, blinking water out his eyes. It was hard to make anything out through the thick clouds and the heavy rain, but the trees seemed changed. They had been climbing their way through endless spruce, but now those straight slim trunks had twisted, leaning in towards each other and winding together until they were locked in by the heavy foliage. It was grotesque. It was beautiful. Every damn island had been like that, and then they had destroyed it. Eugene felt something crunch beneath his feet, looked down to see his boot lift free of a split skull. And then he smelled it, that awful stench, rising up from the mud and clinging to him.   
"Oh, Christ," he shouted, trying to shake the bone and rot off his boot, leaning too heavily on the casket and making them all stumble. He looked around, he could see them now that he knew to look for them: the half-buried bodies sunk down in the earth, sliding free as it softened and unlocked. That was all that the earth was after all, a graveyard in endless layers, the dead stacked against one another in downward plunging piles.  
"Move," he heard Hillbilly say. "Keep moving." So he gritted his teeth and set his gaze on the back of Bill's head and kept going, and there was a comfort in following orders, especially Hillbilly's, and he was with the ones he knew and trusted best, and that had to be reason enough to keep putting one foot after the other.  
So they went on, Hillbilly shouting angry encouragement all the way, heads ducked down to protect against the rain and the strange horrors of the world around them. Eugene wondered if they were seeing the same things, or if their most hated memories took a different shape one from the other.  
There was no sudden shift, the landscape didn't level out and open up before them, but Eugene knew the moment they reached the summit. He felt the difference beneath his feet, a sensation like moving from loose sand to packed earth. Then the rain fell away as swiftly as it had appeared, and Eugene lifted his head and saw that the trees had righted themselves, giving up their various shapes to become uniformly alpine again.   
"This is it," Hillbilly said.  
"Now what?" Bill asked, but Hillbilly only frowned in answer, looking around with an alarmingly lost expression.  
They walked on, the tread of their feet over soft cones and needles the only sound aside from the sigh of the wind through the spruce, the distant cries of men replaced by soft bird song. They moved carefully enough to startle up a grouse from almost beneath Bill's feet; it took the air with a flurry of beating wings and Bill shouted, "Shit!" and they all laughed giddily.   
The trees petered out and gave way to a grassy opening, studded haphazardly with large boulders. The whole space was dripping sunlight. Eugene watched Snafu tilt his head back, his eyes slipping shut, a feline just beginning to stretch under a warm beam.  
"Look," Burgie said, his voice shaking with sudden strain. Eugene followed his gaze, saw a man making his way across the grass towards them.  
The casket dropped to the ground with a heavy thump; they stood in shocked silence and watched him draw nearer, closer. He came to a stop in front of them, warm-eyed, straight-lipped. "You always had to do things the hard way, Eddie."  
They stared dumbly at him for a long, breathless moment, and then,  
"Fuck!" Hillbilly shouted. He spun away, then turned back and kicked the coffin along the burnt edge, hard enough for the cracked wood to collapse inward. "Why the hell have I been dragging you along with me?"  
"I don't know," Ack-Ack answered. "Some innate sense of what this world expects of you, I assume. But you needn't have gone through all the trouble. If you had come straight here, I would have kept you by me, one way or the other." Hillbilly's chest was heaving, he glared burnt-eyed down at the casket. Ack-Ack looked away from him, looked the rest of them over, his face breaking out into a smile. "I see you roped some of the boys into helping you out."  
"I didn't rope them into a damn thing," Hillbilly said. "They came to me."  
"Is that right?" Ack-Ack's eyes dropped to the coffin. "Hmm."  
"Skipper," Jay said, then stopped. "Captain Haldane." He stopped again, looked back and forth between Ack-Ack and the casket.  
"What the fuck is going on, Sir?" Bill said.  
"You men have come a long way," Ack-Ack answered after a moment of considering silence. "Let's get you settled in. We're bivouacked about a quarter-mile from here."  
"We?" Eugene repeated.  
"Myself and the rest of the company." Ack-Ack looked back down at the coffin. "I appreciate your efforts, but you don't need to carry that any further. You can leave it here." With that, he turned and started making his way back across the grass. Eugene looked at Snafu, then Burgie. They all looked to Hillbilly, who shook his head, gaze flickering back and forth between the coffin and Ack-Ack.  
"You heard the captain," he said eventually. "Move out." He followed after Ack-Ack with a long, stalking sort of stride, and Eugene fell into step beside Snafu, and together they stepped past the coffin, and left it where it lay, worn and hard-used, in the shadow of the spruce trees.   
The company was encamped along a slope that looked out across an endless stretch of low mountains, blue and hazy in the distance, their humping shapes deceptively gentle. There were some tents here and there, but they had largely been set up to provide shade for the sleeping men, stretched out across the length of the slope on their bedrolls, or on the grass itself. And why not, Eugene thought, looking down at their sleeping forms. The sun warm and mild, a cool wind sweeping across the summit. The whole mountain was calling him down to sleep. He watched Burgie, Jay and Bill set off down the slope, searching out a likely spot. Snafu started to follow after, then stopped.  
"You coming?"  
"Yeah. In a minute." He walked along the ridge, towards where Ack-Ack and Hillbilly were standing together in the shadow of a large boulder, split down the middle so that it fell apart in the shape of a jagged, downward pointing arrowhead.  
"I've done some scouting, mostly for the sake of appeasing my own curiosity," Ack-Ack was saying as Eugene approached. "Truthfully, there's not much of a need."  
"Still," Hillbilly said. "Suppose I'd better have a look, Sir."  
"After you've slept. Your chest is bleeding." Hillbilly rubbed the red bloom on his shirt, looking away as if embarrassed.   
"It's no bother."  
"It bothers me. It bothers me very much." Ack-Ack lowered himself to the ground, leaning back against the rock. "Lay down, Eddie. You need to rest."  
"Seems like someone should keep a lookout."  
"Gunny Haney's on watch. Don't make me pull rank." Hillbilly stood for a moment longer, frowning as he stared down the slope, and then further on, towards the distant ridges. Then he looked at Ack-Ack, and slowly settled himself on the grass beside him, stretching out long as if rediscovering the length of his own limbs, his head easing back into the cup of his hands. His eyes slid shut almost instantly, and Eugene watched the pinched line of his brow smooth away, his whole body relaxing, turning loose its burdens. Eugene stepped forward, and Ack-Ack looked up from where he had been watching Hillbilly. He smiled warmly. "I'm glad to have you back with the company, Sledge."  
"Thank you, Sir." Ack-Ack had never stood much on ceremony, but Eugene stood at attention anyways, until Ack-Ack's lips twitched in amusement, and he invited Eugene down with a small gesture of his hand.  
"What's on your mind?"  
"Captain, there was something in that coffin," Eugene said, crouching beside him. "It was heavy. I could hear it shifting inside the box if it got thrown around too hard." Ack-Ack made a low sound of interest, but continued to simply watch Eugene with that impossibly gentle gaze. "We thought it was you, Sir. Hillbilly did too, we thought we had to bring you here so," Eugene halted, hesitating, because why, why had they believed they had to carry the casket all this way? He couldn't remember or put words to the compulsion that had driven them on. "So you could be at peace," he finished lamely. Ack-Ack nodded, his gaze thoughtful as he looked out across the tops of the trees, dipping and climbing with the mountain, collecting cloud pools in their wells.  
"I'm sure there was something inside." He smiled wryly. "It may have even been me, or some aspect of me. Perhaps a part of myself that I left with Eddie, or the memory of me that you men kept while you were living." He looked at Eugene. "Thank you. For remembering me so well."  
"I couldn't." Eugene swallowed to dispel the thickness of this throat. "Not half as well as you deserved, Captain."  
"Well. Sometimes I think the regard you men held me in is the reason I woke up here at all. I don't know who else would remember me so finely, or hold me close enough in their thoughts to be able to make the journey to me when their time came. I've been thinking about you men as well." His mouth worked thoughtfully, he looked at Eugene with that same welcoming expression, inviting him to speak openly. "Maybe we summoned each other up this mountain, somehow. Maybe we only have each other to blame or thank."  
"Why are we here, Skipper? What are we waiting on?"  
"We're waiting to called back to it," Ack-Ack answered soberly. "We're not the only ones. They're sleeping beneath every mountain, on every island. Waiting for the word to come down." He gave Eugene a small smile. "But we'll be fit and well-rested when it comes. Go on and find your squad."   
"Yes, Sir," Eugene said. He started to stand back up, then stopped, hesitating. "It was Hillbilly, wasn't it?" Ack-Ack tilted his head questioningly. "In the coffin."  
"The thought had occurred to me," Ack-Ack said slowly, glancing to his other side where Hillbilly slept. "I can't say with certainty, but it's true that he hadn't been able to find his way here on his own, and he's been trying, from the very beginning. There are countless travelers, and so few of them seem to reach the place they're seeking. I've been looking over him as I can, but I'm not able to leave the summit." He looked back at Eugene, reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. Kindness and strength in equal measure. "Thank you, Sledge. Thank you for finding him, and carrying him back here to me."  
"It was an honor, Captain," Eugene answered, choked.  
"Get some rest." Ack-Ack clapped him on the shoulder. "You've earned a little R&R." Eugene stood, scanning the slope for the others, and Ack-Ack was settling down beside Hillbilly as he walked away. They were already sleeping by the time he found them, Jay and Bill pressed back to back beneath a stretched out length of tenting, Burgie slumped against a low rock just above them. Below them on the incline, Snafu was laying on the grass, his bedroll tucked beneath his head as a pillow. Eugene had assumed he was sleeping too, but he shifted as Eugene approached, tilting his head back to squint up at him.  
"Gene," he said, his voice throaty from the half-sleep he had clearly been sinking into. Eugene circled around him until Snafu was under his shadow.  
"Merriell." He felt something lift inside him when he said it, and when Snafu grinned slow and pleased in response. He'd waited all his life and who knew how long after his death to say it.   
"C'mere," Snafu said, and Eugene did, taking his place beside him on the grass. Snafu shifted to make room, and Eugene laid his head beside him along the bedroll, turning in towards him, close enough for his nose to brush along Snafu's cheek. He wrapped an arm around him to pull him closer, and Snafu grabbed his hand in his and held it against his stomach. Snafu's eyes were already closing again, and Eugene felt the heavy weight of sleep coming down over him too, and it was a relief, to be able to sleep again, to sleep in good company, but he resisted for a moment longer, curling his hand on Snafu's stomach to get his attention.  
"Wanna look around later?"  
"Huh?"  
"Bet there's some things on this mountain we've never dreamed of in life. Might be fun to take a look."  
"Sure, Sledgehammer. Soon as we wake up." He was already half asleep again, warm and heavy-limbed against Eugene, and Eugene gave up fighting against what was demanded of them. He closed his eyes, breathing in deep, Snafu's smoke scent and the fresh green snap of the grass, the soft rush of the wind as it moved over them and on down the mountain, and Snafu's low drawl following after him as he slid into a blessedly dreamless sleep. "Gonna see it all, you and me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my original idea was an Arthur and his knights kind of thing, but then I read that the whole legend of Arthur sleeping in Avalon or in a cave was actually just a famous example of a larger motif, where a king or famed hero/warrior is sleeping in some remote location, sometimes alone and sometimes with his men, waiting to be called back to battle when the need is great. And that gave me a bunch of feelings, and then I wrote this! Thanks for reading!


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